If GB keeps spouting brainless kack like this, you might want to re-think your fondness for him. Aside from the substance of what he says, which I'm willing to shrug off as political pablum, I must ask: How frickin' tone-deaf to the moment at hand must a politician be to applaud "the Catholic communion" - not just UK citizens who belong to the Church, but the institution itself - for acting as "the conscience of our country"? WTF?

Very good - I'd be tempted to buy the T-shirt myself if I didn't think it'd be misinterpreted as an anti-Labour statement.

I've got purely selfish reasons to be fond of Gordon Brown - I started work and started a family under the Tories and remember waking up to the fact that we'd have been better off on the dole (because it cost money to work - e.g. in travel - but every penny you earned came straight off your benefits). Then Tax Credits came in and suddenly we could actually think about buying a house, taking holidays, and generally having some quality of life.

It infuriates me to hear people reeling out the 'all parties are the same line' now... the Tories' idea of educational opportunity in my home town was to cream off the top 50 kids every year and send them to the local public school, dumping the rest in an underfunded 'comprehensive' (= secondary modern). My kids now attend an actual comprehensive - one that (horrors!) everyone's allowed to go to - which was built from scratch two years ago and which makes the 'posh' school I attended look like a garden shed.

Just show how quickly people start taking things for granted I guess - or maybe people with younger kids now just don't realise what things used to be like, or higher earners don't realize (or don't care) how much the lives of us 'little people' have improved under Labour. Not looking forward to getting the Tories back though.

You know DM, the fruitcake who's been posting death threats/messages of Christian love (I get the two confused) on here lately? Well, I decided to follow some of his links to see what formidable anti-atheist arguments he has in his arsenal. In pride of place at the top of one of his favourite pages, here:

http://nostraamerica.atspace.com/

- is a video called 'Checkmate, Atheists'. Poor old DM seemingly hasn't noticed that it's a rather mirthsome *parody* of crappy Christian arguments, taking the piss out of people exactly like him.

Mmm, DM seems to be one David Mabus, aka Dennis Markuze, from Montreal, Canada. Google 'David Mabus spam' and you'll see he has a certain notoriety. He doesn't seem to like atheists very much. He's on the Pharyngula bannned list:

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Three key points to make when debating the existence of God. 1. Defining God First, in asking: Does God exist? It would be good to get some clarity about which God we are talking about. I
shall assume we are talking about a God that is omniscient, omnipotent, and
perfectly good: Prof
William Lane Craig defines God as a 'maximally great being' - which he says requires
that God be morally perfect. Prof
Richard Swinburne similarly characterises God as 'a person who is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good'.

It suffices to establish atheism, then (given these guys' characterisations/definitions of theism), that I show beyond reasonable doubt that there's no being that is omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good.

What is Humanism? “Humanism” is a word that has
had and continues to have a number of meanings. The focus here is on kind of atheistic
world-view espoused by those who organize and campaign under that banner in the
UK and abroad. We should acknowledge that
there remain other uses of term. In one of the loosest senses of the expression,
a “Humanist” is someone whose world-view gives special importance to human
concerns, values and dignity. If that is what a Humanist is, then of course most
of us qualify as Humanists, including many religious theists. But the fact
remains that, around the world, those who organize under the label “Humanism” tend
to sign up to a narrower, atheistic view. What does Humanism,
understood in this narrower way, involve? The boundaries of the concept remain somewhat
vague and ambiguous. However, most of those who organize under the banner of Humanism
would accept the following minimal seven-point characterization of their world-view.

Folk who believe in fairies, or miracles, or alien
visitation, are generally fond of an argument called ARGUMENT TO THE BEST
EXPLANATION.
Here's an example of argument to the best explanation (or abduction, as it's sometimes known):
I see shoes poking out from under the curtain and the curtain
twitching slightly above them. I can also hear breathing. I infer there's
someone standing behind the curtain. Why? Because that's the best available
explanation of what I observe. True enough, the twitching might be caused by the breeze from an
open window and the shoes were just coincidentally placed in the same spot. But
I reckon that's a bit less likely than that there's someone standing there (for
what explains the breathing noise?)
Quite what makes an explanation the 'best' is controversial,
but there's some agreement that the simpler and more elegant an explanation,
the better. So, for example, I could explain that twitching curtain by supposing
tha…